Jamie Marich - Trauma and the 12 Steps, Revised and Expanded

What I love about Jamie Marichs approach in Trauma and the 12 Steps is her flexibility in weaving together healing modalities that have worked for her, her clients, and the addiction and trauma communities she serves. She honors the twelve-step model, without accepting its orthodoxies at face value. She knows firsthand the value of twelve-step work in saving lives (her own included) and its flaws. Marich offers a compendium of practices that make using the twelve steps more effective in sustaining recovery. There are suggestions for including expressive arts, yoga breathing, meditation, prayer, and ceremony into the recovery plan, honoring above all the therapeutic relationship as the most potent agent of healing. Trauma and the 12 Steps belongs in the hands of everyone who serves those suffering from addiction.

Amy Weintraub, E-RYT-500, founder of LifeForce Yoga and author of Yoga for Depression and Yoga Skills for Therapists

Dr. Jamie Marich has a highly accessible and clear style of writing that engages the reader. In this new edition of Trauma and the 12 Steps, she updates and expands on her previous message of the importance of acknowledging the co-occurrence of problems with addictions with a history of trauma. She cogently explains the need to address both for a comprehensive recovery and creatively integrates attention to trauma in twelve-step work. This is a book that I will continue to wholeheartedly recommend!

Christine A. Courtois, PhD, ABPP, author of Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy and coauthor of Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach (with Julian Ford)

Dr. Jamie Marich has written the book to address a complex and seemingly intransigent issue. With a compassionate yet defiant and stern voice she exposes the river of trauma running through the twelve-step experience in which so many are drowning. Clearly an admirer of the twelve-step philosophy, Marich brings understanding and a cogent critique of the culture with clarity and her own personal experiences to help those in recovery navigate the tumultuous waters of trauma in all of the ways they affect our lives. Her deep love and respect for people who are suffering shines in this book. What I love most about this book is that it is built around a well-thought-out solutionone that is accessible and straightforward guided by years of collective wisdom and experience, and most especially painpain that is transformed into a whole new way of living.

Dan Griffin, MA, author of A Mans Way through the Twelve Steps;A Mans Way through Relationships: Learning to Love and Be Loved, and coauthor of Helping Men Recover: A Mans Workbook

Trauma and the 12 Steps enhances our understanding of the role of unresolved PTSD as an invisible force that fuels addictions. Her expertise is offered in an accessible tone that leaves you feeling as if youve just sat across the table with a cup of tea with a beloved friend, sponsor, mentor, and skilled therapist. Dr. Marich is brazenly unafraid to challenge her readers to let go of our own intellectual theories and to join her in a real and raw pursuit of human presence. Undoubtedly, we come away from this book both clinically informed and spiritually enriched as we discover a strength-based approach to caring for individuals who suffer from addictions.

Arielle Schwartz, PhD, author of The Complex PTSD Workbook: A MindBody Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole; The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Practical MindBody Tools to Heal Trauma, Foster Resilience and Awaken Your Potential; and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology: Interventions to Enhance Embodiment in Trauma Treatment

With this expanded edition of Trauma and the 12 Steps, Jamie Marich extends and updates her compassionate, meaningful work for survivors of adverse childhood experiences (trauma). In her deeply compassionate voice, she reminds us that the wisdom found in twelve-step recovery is not simply a sobriety path for the addicted, but that it can also become a universal roadmap to connection and healing from the inside out. I highly recommended this book for trauma survivors, their loved ones, and the clinicians who serve them.

Robert Weiss, PhD, LCSW, CCO, founder and executive director at Seeking Integrity Treatment Centers and author of Prodependence: Moving Beyond Codependency; Out of the Doghouse: A Step-by-Step Relationship-Saving Guide for Men Caught Cheating, and Sex Addiction 101: A Basic Guide to Healing from Sex, Porn, and Love Addiction

Every person in recovery, working in the field of recovery, or advocating for people in recovery should read this timely and thoughtful book. Beyond updating her earlier work on trauma, dissociation, and the body, Dr. Jamie Marich elegantly introduces and expands on the importance of concepts that are often left untreated in recovery literature. This includes an analysis of the traumatic impact of oppression, and exploring the impact of spiritual abuse as a form of trauma. Jamies deft handling and honoring of cultural and spiritual diversity is a high point of this new work, but so too is her continuation of what she has been doing for over a decadewhich is to attempt to bridge the harmful divide between those who attack twelve-step ideology and practice and those who espouse it. Given the current addiction crisis in our world, surely the only right answer to the question what is the right pathway to recovery? is all of them.

Dawn Nickel, PhD, founder of SHE RECOVERS

In our never-ending quest for self-aggrandizement, we demonize addiction, obsess about trauma, and romanticize recovery. This makes ordinary living, which includes trauma, addiction, and recovery, all the more difficult. Yet, as Jamie Marich tells us in this wonderful new edition of Trauma and the 12 Steps, recovery is coming home: coming home to trauma, coming home to addiction, and making peace with reality as it is rather than as we insist it must be. Dr. Marich is a wise guide to homecoming and I encourage you to read this book and follow her advice.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of RecoveryThe Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

Trauma and the 12 Steps is an extraordinary state-of-the-art integration of psychological theory, psychotherapy practice, and twelve-step recovery. In this updated and revised edition, Dr. Jamie Marich skillfully weaves together her personal history, deep hard-won insights, and vast professional experience, with client anecdotes and extensive research to articulate the art and science of multimodal trauma-informed care and how it can be actualized in the context of both addiction treatment and twelve-step-oriented recovery. The result is a must-read volume that will be of great benefit to clinicians and other addiction treatment professionals, trauma survivors in twelve-step recovery, and anyone that struggles with co-occurring substance use and trauma. This is a work that embodies the essence of Step Twelve as well as one of the foundational spiritual principles of twelve-step recoveryservice to others.

Dan Mager , MSW , executive director at Vance Johnson Recovery Center and author of Roots and Wings: A Guide to Mindful Parenting in Recovery and Some Assembly Required: A Balanced Approach to Recovery from Addiction and Chronic Pain

By including the most current research and thinking on trauma, Dr. Jamie Marich supports in practical terms what we are now learning about the long-term deleterious effects of avoiding trauma in our recovery work. Without losing any of the passion and immediacy of the earlier edition, Marich continues in her wonderful style of interweaving actual stories into the development of a deep understanding of the pains and problems of undiagnosed and unaddressed trauma in the recovery journey.